Instead of wind and solar farms, Hudak said, a Tory-run Ontario would rely on the “workhorses of our system”: hydro dams and gas and nuclear generating stations. The idea is to stabilize prices — not to lower them, despite the Tories’ hot rhetoric, but to head off further increases after the doubling of the average price of electricity in Ontario in the last decade or so.

“We need to end these expensive subsidies for the wind and solar projects that are driving our rates higher and higher still,” Hudak said.

The food-container manufacturer at whose Niagara plant he made the promise, Stanpac, has a factory in Texas, too. Electricity costs are 60 per cent cheaper there, its vice-president said in introducing Hudak. It’s a more attractive place to expand than Ontario is. Hudak fretted about losing business and good jobs to the south.

Texas’s electricity is cheaper. But its electricity system is not a textbook example of greatness.

Its structure is similar to Ontario’s: it has local delivery companies that own the wires and are mostly monopolies, and they’re distinct from the generating companies that make the electricity the wires carry.

Texas’s generating companies are mostly private, which is unlike Ontario. The biggest of them, TXU Energy, with about 1.7 million customers, was taken over in a leveraged buyout in 2007. Loaded up with the billions of dollars in debt its new owners took on to acquire it, TXU’s parent company killed plans to open eight coal-powered generating stations it had expected to construct (it still set out to build three).

Two weeks ago, TXU’s parent filed for bankruptcy protection. Regulators have stepped in to promise Texans their light switches will still work.

It didn’t help TXU to have its coal-based electricity undercut by natural-gas prices that have plunged thanks to fracking, which is huge in Texas. That’s the underlying reason electricity is so cheap there: Texas sits on a vast reserve of shale gas and producers are shattering the ground to siphon it out.

The last time the Tories were in power, they broke up Ontario Hydro and devised a plan to pay off its monstrous debts, racked up by decades of keeping electricity artificially cheap. They replaced it with the current family of smaller companies, each with its own bureaucratic aristocracy.

The problems the Progressive Conservatives left for the Liberals, the Liberals have mostly solved. Remember summer brownout warnings? We haven’t had one in nearly a decade. The Liberals have phased out coal power, a major achievement whose very invisibility is part of what makes it so impressive.

Having done that, the Liberals created new problems: the Green Energy Act, aimed at making Ontario a global powerhouse in windmill and solar-panel manufacturing, has not conspicuously done so. But it has driven up electricity prices and locked us into paying for power we don’t need, while enraging rural Ontarians who don’t like to see windmills off their back decks.

The royals, the people at the very top, aren’t paid as well as they were under the Tories. But they do still run a system where loads of people make the annual $100,000-a-year list.

Even so, it’s not quite the problem Hudak said it is on Monday.

“We need to pare down that massive hydro bureaucracy,” Hudak said. “They have 11,000 people in the hydro bureaucracy making 100 grand a year. Can you believe that? Eleven thousand. Let’s pare down that bureaucracy and pass the savings on to consumers.”

That’s only fair if your definition of a bureaucrat includes people who spend their work days in cherry-pickers and in the control rooms of nuclear power plants, who make up most of the entries on the $100,000 list. Perhaps they’re overpaid, but we can’t just pare them down as if they aren’t needed.

The Liberals are fairly content with where things stand, promising only tinkering with the details of Ontarians’ bills. The New Democrats promise an arbitrary $100 annual rebate and to take the HST off hydro bills, which means we’d pay less but would do nothing about the underlying pressures on prices.

That those pressures are difficult for a government to do anything about is the central problem. We underpaid for electricity for decades and the shock of more realistic prices hurts.

All the parties acknowledge this implicitly, since none of them promises to take electricity prices back to where they used to be. But wouldn’t it be nice if one of them were willing to say it out loud?

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/davidreevely

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